Full employment could be redefined

Just as the U.S. nears full employment based on the principal measure used for almost eight decades, President Donald Trump and his team are looking at new yardsticks.

The jobless rate probably held in January at 4.7 percent, according to the median estimate from economists ahead of Friday's Labor Department report. Federal Reserve policymakers see such a level — which is down from a post-recession high of 10 percent in 2009 — as being at or near full employment, meaning anything lower would push inflation higher.

While the rate's use as a chief indicator dates to the Depression era, Trump spent last year's election campaign calling the measure "phony" and arguing it overstates the strength of the labor market. More recently, his Treasury secretary nominee, Steven Mnuchin, said the number has "excessive influence" over policy and that it fails to account for people who have dropped out of the labor force or aren't actively looking for work.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Trump's economic team will look at a "multitude of statistics" in assessing labor-market strength.

Trump's officials actually share common ground with Fed Chair Janet Yellen on their support for reviewing a range of labor-market indicators. Yellen has argued in the past that the jobless rate didn't capture slack evident elsewhere, as the Fed kept interest rates near zero until late 2015. She's pointed to low levels of labor-force participation and the large number of part-time workers who would prefer full-time employment.

Fed policymakers indicated that there's still room for improvement in the job market. While the unemployment rate "stayed near its recent low" in December, "some further strengthening" is expected in labor conditions.

That doesn't mean central bankers or Labor Department economists are about to abandon the unemployment rate as their main gauge. That figure is the "number that's most comparable over time and one that's most comparable internationally," said former Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erica Groshen, who left the government last month at the end of her four-year term as President Barack Obama's appointee to the post.

Mnuchin, in written responses to senators' questions following his confirmation hearing last month, cited the so-called U-5 rate as an alternative indicator. That rate, which stood at 5.7 percent in December, includes discouraged workers as well as a group called marginally attached workers, who aren't working or actively looking for work but want a job. Another measure, the U-6 or underemployment rate, was 9.2 percent in December. It also includes part-time employees who want full-time work.

"People change their minds about whether they're discouraged," said Groshen, who was previously a Fed economist. "We've been measuring the unemployment rate the same way since the 1940s. Most other countries that have an unemployment rate use a definition that's similar to ours — partly because we created it and because it works."